FOCUS INTERVIEW
Issue 1, December 2008
Mike Manos Microsoft's data center shipping magnate
Microsoft has committed to modular containerised data centers in a big way. It will put 200 of them under one roof in a Chicago facility. Mike Manos, the man responsible, tells Ambrose McNevin why and how
manufacturing and products that were specifi cally designed to fi t neatly into standard 40`metal boxes. Cost of transport was pushed ever lower and goods fl owed across the globe at an unprecedented scale. A strategic infl ection point had occurred and the world economy changed forever.
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Now almost sixty years on from fi rst use, containers are back in the news, this time to house data centers.
Some believe containers are a step on the path to industrialisation of the data center. If the components of a data center become commoditised to fi t into a standard metal box and the metal box itself becomes the commodity then someone puts several hundred under one roof with standardised power and cooling, will we have a standardised, scalable industrialised data center?
IN THE SPOTLIGHT Mike Manos, general manager for Microsoft’s data center operations doesn’t claim to be attempting to standardise the data center
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t took a little under a decade. From the 1950s container shipping accelerated the world economy, setting off a chain reaction which led to globalised
through building a major facility using connected modularised data centers housed inside shipping containers.
Nor is Manos claiming that his plan to put up to 200 server-packed shipping containers into a single Chicago data center heralds a sea change in all data center design and operation. He does however admit that it has touched a nerve of those currently investing in traditional set ups and he knows his project is being as closely watched as any build ever undertaken.
“What containers represent is a scale unit. 1.
Containers are positioned at 45º angles for ease of deployment and removal. Facilities are delivered via "spines".
Each container has servers or storage, depending on applications, pluged in to the power, water and the network. That is the reason that this is an interesting business case that data center operaters should take notice of. They should be thinking “if I’m going to build a data center should I get involved in the religious wars, about water and air, air cooled versus water cooled. What containers bring is a conversation change. I’ve got a central spine of services. Is it AC, is it DC, I don’t care,” he says.
By rolling 200 containers into a single facility which it will manage as a single operation,
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